Wedding Cake Etiquette

It wasn’t until the1930s that the bride and groom always posed for a photograph cutting the cake together.
— Photo, Etiquipedia’s private library

The ‘Cake Smashing’ Custom

Some wedding customs— sharing food, for example— are ancient and universal. Others are more recent. It wasn’t until the1930s that the bride and groom always posed for a photograph cutting the cake together.

Still others are far more recent. “Bride’s Book of Etiquette” (1993), having explained that sharing the first slice of cake symbolizes a couple’s willingness to share a household, feels the need to add “(No food fights!).”

Unthinkable as it would have been a generation ago, messing up your new spouse’s face with cake is now considered part of the fun at weddings. “It is more and more prevalent for the couple to grind the wedding cake in each other’s faces,” a correspondent complains to Miss Manners in her book “On (Painfully Proper) Weddings” (1995). “Even fathers will urge the groom to ‘give it to her, smoosh it in her face.’ ” Miss Manners sees this as part of a growing show-biz note in weddings, as when a groom goes for a laugh by answering the big question not, “I do,” but, “Hmmm, I’ll think about it.”

Certainly a lot of people have become uncomfortable with solemnity. But the guests who egg on the bride and groom to smear each other with cake are also engaging in an all-too-traditional practice, the bantering ridicule of affection. (People in Jane Austen novels decry it as “raillery.”)

Respectable married people are not fair game for this sort of teasing. Encouraging cake mashing, like a host of other awful wedding customs, from shivaree (a noisy mock serenade on the wedding night) to tying a tin can to the newlyweds’ getaway car, is one last chance for the couple’s friends to indulge in the game of “X and Y, sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G.” — The Los Angeles Times, 1997

Etiquette Enthusiast, Maura J Graber, is the Site Editor for the Etiquipedia© Etiquette Encyclopedia